Dr. Alberto Ledesma's new graphic memoir, Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer: Undocumented Vignettes from a Pre-American Life, is a hybrid memoir made up of cartoons and essays which all consider the same questionat what point can someone who has been a long-time undocumented immigrant living in the United States be considered an American in the making?

Besides working as a Graduate Diversity Director for Arts & Humanities at UC Berkeley -- from where he graduated three times over -- Dr. Ledesma has also published academic articles and poetry, and four previous short stories: three in Con/Safos: A Chicana/o Literary Magazine, and one, as a chapbook, in Gary Sotos Chicano Chapbook Series (#17). He has been a faculty member at CSU Northridge, Monterey Bay, and UC Berkeley. His essays have appeared in ColorLines and New American Media. He has also participated in Sandra Cisneros's Macondo Workshop and in the VONA Writers Workshop. His latest project, Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer, is a series of visual vignettesdrawings and prosethat focus on his experience as an undocumented immigrant student during the early 1980s.